Businesses are doing a great job leveraging marketing technology platforms such as Adobe and Google to generate interest from their targeted customer demographic and drive Web traffic to their digital platforms. However, this success comes at a significant cost to the businesses.
This cost comes both from a marketing technology platform investment perspective as well as the spend on digital advertising initiatives, says Pieter van Eyssen, principal solution consultant at Genesys, who will be presenting on ‘Sell faster and more to your digital customer’ at the ITWeb Virtual CX Summit 2020.
The 2020 Gartner CMO Spend Survey revealed that 68% of the respondents are expecting a budget increase for marketing technology and nearly two-thirds are expecting a budget increase across the various marketing channels, with the digital advertising channel dominating the channel budget mix.
“While these investments are a key component of an overall effective marketing strategy, in many cases these marketing operations occur in a siloed manner, disconnected or not visible to the frontline or customer service departments,” he adds.
“This results in lost sales or conversion opportunities when the marketing sourced or qualified leads engage the business, via the advertised or available communication channels because contextually relevant information is unavailable to the frontline employees, leaving these valuable human resources unable to show empathy and provide the expected personalised experience to the customer.”
Analytical insights
According to Van Eyssen, marketing technology platforms are effective and play a critical role in the generation of a significant amount of data as it pertains to the marketing sourced and/or qualified leads and the use thereof in personalising the customers’ experience and the offers made during the customers’ online journey.
“However, in many cases, this data and related analytical insights into the effectiveness of the various marketing campaigns and information on challenges customers experience during their online journey are only available after the fact, leaving the business unable to act and take advantage of the conversion or sales opportunity generated by said campaigns in a timely fashion.”
In an ever increasing competitive market, having the capability to engage a prospect at the right time, in real-time, on the preferred channel and with the most appropriate resource, human or virtual, empowered with the full context of the customer journey, current and past, is a key differentiator, he explains.
“When you create engagements based on empathy, customers feel remembered, heard and understood,” says van Eyssen. “This is how you forge stronger connections, earn your customers’ trust and loyalty and see better lead conversion outcomes.”
Better, faster
Speaking of how AI and machine learning (ML) can be used to help businesses sell better and faster to their customers, he says they may receive thousands or even hundreds of thousands of visitors to their Web sites each day, both unsolicited and sourced or driven by active marketing campaigns.
“Each of these visitors or prospects embark on a journey on your Web site in search for a product or service. The journey data generated from prior Web visits becomes the ever growing data source on which a practical application of AI through ML can be applied to analyse and compare previously completed journeys and current active journeys, to determine the probability of a positive business outcome, all in real-time.”
He says the power of AI in combination with customer journey and marketing owned customer data, will enable and empower businesses to not only engage prospects at the most opportune moment on the preferred channel, but also to drive increased sales conversions through empathy and contextually relevant, personalised experiences between your prospects and your frontline human resources.
During his presentation, Van Eyssen will describe Genesys’ vision of ‘experience as a service’, position some of the top trends and challenges faced by online retailers and do a live demonstration of Genesys Predictive Engagement, the company’s AI-powered, cloud-delivered solution.
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